[Switchblade]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kickback

Hello.

So Kamen Rider Fourze is my baby. I love the show, I love the characters, and I will defend the show to anyone who wants to argue about it.

THAT BEING SAID.

The difference I see so far between Fourze and Wizard, is that the villains in Fourze were all characters we got to know (with the exception of just a few). Even the 2 episode bad guys who weren't Horoscopes were often characters they introduced and you got to know and the group had to find a way to save the person and not just destroy the monster side.

In Wizard, the bad guys are people that are already "dead" and the phantom beast inside them has taken over. So there's no "getting to know" the bad guys, they're just there and the surprise is when you find out who the bad guy was (well, for two episodes at least).

Because of that, Fourze (in my opinion) had a bigger impression ... when a character died (Emoto for example) it was really sad, because you got to know that character aside from the good guy/bad guy part of it. Wizard? Not so much, not yet at least.

Thoughts?

I can agree with you on the weekly monsters being more developed. That was one of the points of Fourze after all, that Gentaro would defeat and then befriend the current Zodiart. On the whole, though, I like the Phantoms more.

A lot of that comes down to motivation. We already have a clear motivation for the Phantoms. They want to break open the Gates and create more Phantoms so that they can retry their big ritual thingy. With the Zodiarts it took us almost a quarter of the series to get told that kids were being given Astro Switches in hopes of finding the rest of the twelve Horoscopes. And even then we didn't know what the point of the Horoscopes was until the end of the series. For me, one of Fourze's biggest failings (outside of the pacing problems) was that the masterminds behind the monsters lacked any obvious end goal for most of the show. It was very frustrating. At this point it at least feels like we have some sense of what the Phantoms are trying to do, even if the details are still vague.

Quote:

Originally Posted by bluesparrow

My major complaint with Wizard so far is the lack of characterization for Haruto. I haven't seen as many of these shows as you guys have, but I'm 20-something eps through Fourze and 12 through OOO and compared to those this guy's a complete cypher.

We know part of his origin. We know he likes donuts. Everything else is a mystery. We don't know what he was doing before the eclipse. We don't know what his life's ambition is if he ever defeats all the Phantoms. His personality is pretty bland. We know he takes his mission very seriously but thats a given. Meanwhile by the end of episode 1 of Fourze and OOO we know quite a bit about the protagonists. As of Episode 4 of Wizard... next to nothing about Haruto.

This is probably intentional though so I'm not holding it against the show. But he is pretty much a blank at this point.

I don't mind this. It's been done in the past and has worked well. I'm specifically thinking of Takumi from Faiz, who was just this random dude who showed up and could use the Faiz Gear. It wasn't until about halfway through the show that we really got to know anything about him, and that turned out to be a really interesting plot twist.

It's probably also worth remembering that Wizard's head writer worked on the good part of Hibiki, which was a show that wasn't very interested in backstory and preferred to spend time examining the characters relating to each other in the present.